The Avengers

Movie Name: The Avengers

Year of Release: 2012

Director: Joss Whedon

Stars: Robert Downey Jr., Mark Ruffalo, Chris Evans, Chris Hemsworth, Scarlett Johansson, Jeremy Renner, Tom Hiddleston, Clark Gregg, Samuel L. Jackson, Cobie Smulders, Stellan Skarsgaard, Gwyneth Paltrow, Paul Bettany, Alexis Denisof, Powers Boothe

Genre: Action, Adventure, Sci-Fi

Score out of ten (whole numbers only): 5

Synopsis:

Joss Whedon's career has been mostly as a writer (for both TV series and film), though his first feature film "Serenity" was an expansion of his own TV series "Firefly". "The Avengers" is based on the comic books from Marvel Comics, that assembled different heroes, namely Captain America, Thor, Ant Man, The Wasp and also The Hulk. The comics were first published in the 60s from legendary creator Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, and throughout the years the team kept changing. The movie picks up threads from the multiple films that Marvel has released thus far, namely the "Iron Man" films, "Thor" and "Captain America". The plot concerns Thor's disgraced brother, Loki, trying to rule the Earth through a device that opens a passageway between different dimensions. All the heroes are brought together to battle this menace, but first they have to work out their own differences.
Joss Whedon's film is quite obviously meant to be an entertaining and directly focused on appealing to the largest majority of demographics possible. It's also a film that suffers from a real lack of vision or ideas of film - the fantastic special effects animate characters that are paper thin, and though the motivation between all of the main characters seems quite clear, at a certain point with all the noise going around, it oddly becomes anti-climatic. For all the fantastic (and obviously quite expensive) effects you see on screen, there are no characters you want to embark on a journey with. This is one of the films, where though you have some good actors to work with, they are obviously lost in the midst of effects that overwhelm the entire picture. What made "Iron Man" from Jon Favreau work, was the focus on Robert Downey Jr.'s Tony Stark - he had a humanity and a dimension, something that lacks in this film and in it's characters. "The Avengers" is a well oiled product, but it's a hollow one.